


Singularis

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV Second Person, Quadruple Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 18:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20018779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: There is a darkness at Eleutheria’s heart.(Written for the promptMourning one’s twin.)





	Singularis

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know if this is pretentious enough. Better give it a Latin title to make sure.

In a hollow statue, the Piper dreams. 

Speak to her. Reach out. She will gather you close as a mother does her child, wrap you in a susurration of wings and voices; once, she will tell you, these groves drank sunlight instead of unlight, and night didn’t seep from the skin of space like blood from a wound. 

_Go home,_ she will say. When a king grieves, it is the realm that suffers. This is no good place for her kind, nor for yours.

(You will wake, later, to the phantom of sunlight on your skin, weeping without knowing why.)

.

In a prison, a Venerable Flautist practices her art. She was here long before your species first looked at the stars in wonder, and she will be here after every one of your descendants is dead.

Don’t be so quick, she warns, to yearn for power. When a tyrant mourns, even the favored must fear. Better to slip like a minnow through the teeth of a shark and be gone.

(You will stumble out into merciful darkness, beset by the feeling that in that labyrinth, you lost something more than just yourself. Don’t look back, traveler. The dead don’t return.)

.

In the ruined spire of a rotting messenger, a servant keeps vigil, faithful through each solitary hour – not to the one that held its chain, but to the one that broke it.

Ask why, and it will look to the sun below, burning black and inconsolable. The Halved is merciless, but he has promised: every star will be toppled in time. Darkness will rush to fill the emptiness after, and carry with it the scattered ones, rising to reclaim what was lost.

(Ask the Halved, and it will say only this: every promise is betrayal. What was lost is _gone._ )

.

At the heart of a kingdom ungoverned, there is a distance uncrossable.

Mortal blood will freeze before a fraction of that ocean has been traversed, and every light flicker out; even a sun’s soul might die unnumbered times, and be reborn, and grow no closer to the isolate castle at the center.

There, they say, the darkness is not void but crushing weight, and Eleutheria’s shadowed king abides, waiting for night’s liberation.

(And there, far past the event horizon of a rage too great to ever be escaped, one thing alone remains: the memory of a light extinguished long ago.)


End file.
